A Guide To Commercial Innovation In Artificial Intelligence

By Deepa Ravindranath

The artificial intelligence (AI) landscape is growing quickly. Artificial intelligence startups raised $5B in 2016, a 10-fold increase since 2012. Tech giants (Google, Microsoft, IBM) are contributing heavily to this acceleration, both in academic and practical pursuits. Google published 218 papers on machine learning in 2016, nearly double the number of publications in 2014. In December 2016, Microsoft launched a new venture fund specifically to evaluate and fund AI startups, kicking off the fund with an investment in Element AI, then acquiring Maluuba just one month later.